Hello, I've been playing a rogue since last night and am trying to understand how hide works exactly. A lot of the info I can find on the skill is from like 2005/2006, and I'm not sure what is correct. 1) Do you have to actually turn off auto attack to use hide in combat? I'm pretty sure I've seen a success while using it in combat without turning it off, but I could be wrong. Old posts indicate you have to turn attack off, so I'd like to clarify this. 2) Can it be leveled up in combat? I use it basically on cooldown while I'm fighting, and I don't think it has gone up a single time. It's at 9 points now, and the points I've gained have been from out of combat use.
The message I have seen is "you have momentarily ducked away from main combat" or something along those lines, by the way.
Using Hide skill in combat, instead of invising you, has the effect of dropping your agro when successful. It has a chance to skill up whenever it succeeds. At 9 skill, that's going to be pretty seldom in combat. You may consider jumping your skill to 50 or so on the class trainer.
They changed it a few years ago. We used to have to leave combat and stop moving to evade (hide to lose agro). Now you can just hit the the button and not worry about anything else for evade. That's why you're seeing conflicting information. Mine has been maxed for so long, I'm not sure if evading raises the skill or not. When using it for invis, you do need to not have attack on and not be moving. Moving will unhide you unless you first click sneak as well for shroud of stealth (sos).
For leveling reasons I always used at least 50 points on hide, unless you feel like spilling it up herself. But I always had a hot key made while leveling because I needed some skill in pickpocket for epic, so my newbie hotkey looked something like /doability # (for hide) /doability # for disarm /attack off /doability # for pickpocket /attack on That kept my skills up kinda, disarm always lags behind for some reason.
